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A thoroughly sporadic column from astronomer Mike Brown on space and science, planets and dwarf planets, the sun, the moon, the stars, and the joys and frustrations of search, discovery, and life. With a family in tow. Or towing. Or perhaps in mutual orbit.

I first published this five years ago today. It's all still true. -- MEB

My father was a rocket scientist. Well, OK, not precisely. More
specifically he was a rocket engineer. Or, more precisely still, he was
an engineer who worked on the computers that went into space and
navigated the rockets. He worked on the Saturn V that lifted Apollo
astronauts toward the moon, he worked on the Lunar Module, which touched
down on the moon, he worked on the Lunar Rover, which drove astronauts
around on the moon. All of this before he was 30 years old.

I never remember him talking about it at all, talking about what it was
like to send men to the moon, to be involved in such a tremendous
adventure, but, ten years ago, in the little farming town on the edge of
the Mississippi River where he grew up, I had a conversation with one
of his friends from those days, and he told me that they all felt like
they had lived in a magical time. After the Apollo missions ended, they
all later worked on the Space Station and more mundane things like the
ticket-taker on the BART trains that I used to take when I was a
graduate student living on the San Francisco Bay. But nothing in their
lives was ever quite like a being a bunch of thirty-year-old kids living
in northern Alabama having the blind optimism to think that if there
was a rocket being built they knew enough to put the computers together
to make those rockets bring people to the moon. And back. And then
actually doing it.